Saturday, September 29, 2012

I was privileged to get to know Fr. Gerry Gauvreau when he was here in Halifax with the Companions of the Cross. Father Gerry used to come out to our first 40 Days vigil here in Halifax and I loved to see him down there at the vigil site. I recall one evening, a car passed and a young man yelled out something obscene at the people praying. Father Gerry didn't miss a beat; he turned and made the sign of the Cross and called out loudly "God bless you too".

This is a priest whom I can admire with no hesitation. May there be more priests with his courage and transparent approach to all people.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Joyce Arthur has called for the resignation of Rona Ambrose, Minister for the Status of Women, because she voted in favour of motion 312. A motion to study the science about the unborn and when does someone become a human being? Arthur says that Ambrose has thrown women under the bus. Gee, who is extreme here?

“It’s pretty clear from the past decade of polling that a majority of Canadians don’t identify with the fanaticism espoused by Ms. Arthur. On one hand they claim to stand up for a woman’s right to choose and then on the other they demand the resignation of Ms. Ambrose when she exercises her freedom to choose.”
- WeNeedaLaw.ca

Please join me in sending a brief note of thanks to Rona Ambrose, an MP who voted for Motion 312 yesterday. As Minister of State for the Status of Women, she is receiving a lot of hate mail today for her stand on this issue of re-opening the discussion of when does the unborn become a human being.

Women think that she has betrayed them, and the emails are on the whole very negative. Please join me in sending her a positive note of thanks. Her email address is:

Monday, September 24, 2012

Why doesn't anyone challenge Arthur on this "competing rights" thing? If rights are to compete, they should be equal rights. What is being juxtaposed here is the right of a woman not to be pregnant against a fetus' right to be born, in other words, a right to life. They are not equal by any stretch of the imagination. The woman only has to be pregnant for 9 months, then it is over for her. Her life does not end, it has some inconvenient changes in it, but the life of the fetus is simply ended. That is a huge difference.

KELOWNA, British Columbia, September 21, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) - As the city of Kelowna prepares to celebrate Protect Human Life Week beginning on September 22, the executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada has said the abortion advocacy group will stage a pro-abortion protest at city hall every day of the week.

ARCC Executive Director Joyce Arthur lamented that “the city is undermining women’s equality rights and encouraging and endorsing a view that is contrary to Canadian and international law,” according to a report from Kelowna Capital News.

Although Kelowna city council had backed away from flying the Protect Human Life Week pro-life flag, Kelowna Right to Life’s Executive Director Marlon Bartram issued an invitation to local schools to fly the pro-life flag during the week.

“In fact,” Bartram pointed out, “according the BC Teacher’s Union, 197 schools have closed in BC in the past ten years, and there are nearly 20,000 fewer students overall than there were just five years ago. Certainly, the aborting of 15,000 unborn future students each and every year in BC is having a devastating impact.”
- LifeSiteNews

Led by the aging Joyce Arthur, always with the flower in her hair. I always think of that sad song about going to San Francisco and wearing flowers in one's hair, thank goodness those hippy days are gone. Does anyone really want to be identified with her?

You know those other rallies, I'm sure - the ones full of grim ladies well past aborting age, marching with coat hangers as their emblems, yelling about their "right" to end the pregnancies they'll never have again. - Mary Eberstadt, The Loser Letters

This reminds me of the United Church minister here in Halifax who called our 40 Days for Life vigil "evil" and she suggested that pro-choice people should hold a vigil called 40 Days for Choice. Well, they never did. Funny how that doesn't quite work out.

The second fellow interviewed in this video should get his facts straight. When he says this is the birthplace of Roe v Wade, he neglects to mention that the defendant Norma McCorvey never even had an abortion but was used by two lawyers who were seeking their own fame. McCorvey carried her baby to term, and has since converted to the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, she was arrested at Notre Dame when she protested the appearance of President Obama at that Catholic college and his being conferred an honorary doctorate of law by the university. I am sure she would have something to say about this "false" church.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

My daughter sent me a link to this video and I think it is worth posting. Women need to rethink what they wear, because of what it does to men. Most women don't appreciate the fact that men react differently to these things than women do. The attitude is that men should not see women as objects; however the science shows that they can't help but do just that when clothing is sparse.

Just finished reading The Loser Letters by Mary Eberstadt. A great read, I highly recommend it. It is funny, satirical, biting, full of hip slang (Mary has 4 children in the teen years, with lots of teen culture going on in her house).

The author is a young woman, raised as a Christian, who loses her faith at university, becomes sexually active, lives with a druggy boyfriend, becomes pregnant, and has an abortion against her wishes. The boyfriend leaves her. Out of guilt and remorse, she overdoses and ends up in a rehab.

Each chapter is a letter to prominent atheists, furthering their cause, by pointing out to them the flaws in their position. She advises them to stay away from certain topics, because their logic is flawed and because the other side, the Loser side as she calls believers, have so much more going for them. Areas such as music, art, literature, architecture, all the really great stuff was done by believers.

In conclusion, she wishes them well but she chooses to go back to believing, because God or Loser, is the only reality that explains her guilt, shame and remorse. And because Loser is the only one who might love her unconditionally just as she found she loved her aborted baby.

This is a great read. I want to give it to every young university student who mocks religion and then ask them to rebut it. Eberstadt is extremely well-read (her references to authors is very long, she is familiar with all of her opponents) and she knows the believing counterparts - Augustine, Aquinas, Sheen, and on and on. She would be a formidable opponent in a debate.

The book is quick, an easy read, I am going to read it again right away as there is so much packed into such a short book. And I highly recommend it.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Motion 312 proposes to re-examine section 223 of Canada’s Criminal Code, which stipulates that a child only becomes a human being once he or she has fully proceeded from the womb. The committee would be charged with examining the medical evidence with a view to assessing the humanity of the unborn child.

It is opposed by all of the party leaders, including Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has repeatedly pledged that he will oppose and vote against any effort to re-open debate on abortion.

....

CLC joins Woodworth in finding it ironic that opponents of his motion criticize him for wanting to return to the dark ages when they themselves are defending an outdated 400-year-old law.LifeSiteNews

Abortion is the sacred cow of our society. People are afraid to discuss it, for fear that they just might have been wrong on the issue. And if they are, how will they face up to the holocaust that they have sanctioned?

Thursday, September 13, 2012

A good article by Celeste McGovern. I read this in the recent LifeCanada Journal. McGovern is a Canadian journalist living in the UK. A Google search brings up other interesting articles by this journalist and I will be sure to post more from her.

... the wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates is no slacker to sit back at the lake and watch the sunset. What she wants to do with her fortune is to help the poorest women in the world have what the rest of us take for granted: birth control.

So she and her friends at the U.K.’s State Department organized the London Summit on Family Planning on Wednesday, dedicated to bringing contraceptive services to an additional 120 million women and girls by the year 2020.

Then Melinda graciously announced that she and Bill had talked, and they decided to increase their spending on family planning to over $1 billion. They tallied the day’s take and, guess what, they announced jubilantly they had exceeded their $4 billion goal.

But wasn’t this a little surreal? No one disagreed. Everyone was breathless with success and brimming with enthusiasm. Family planning was cool again, and it was driving a BMW. Where were the usual right-wing zealots who bog these meetings down, fretting about the “the full range of reproductive health services,” including abortion?

Was there not a single evangelical in London? No dour Catholic to throw cold theology on this? No cranky American politician to protest taxpayers’ money being spent abroad when people at home are struggling? .....

....
And there was the little slip up by Korea’s ambassador to Britain. When Korea was introduced as a “model for the world,” because it brought its “contraceptive prevalence rate” to 100 per cent from something dismal 50 years ago, he said they were actually now struggling with a low birth rate and “perhaps we overdid it.”

Yikes. But then he gave his money and it was forgotten.

......
The media was kind, highlighting how Melinda was valiantly pitching herself against the patriarchal Catholic Church. She even looked like she was defending it when she said she is a practising Catholic and only dislikes some of its teaching.

“This is not about abortion. This is not about population control,” she said. It might all be funded by the super wealthy white, like it used to be, but this has nothing to do with those rotten old plans of forcing vasectomies on railway platforms in the 1970s. So no one mentioned that by chance, on the very same day as the summit, the government of Jaipur, the largest city in Rajasthan, launched its drive to sterilize 100,000 women in just two weeks.

And certainly there was no mention of the complaint to the Supreme Court today, of Indian women being maimed and killed, bleeding to death on straw mats following “sterilization camps” throughout India that receive U.K. and U.S. family planning funding.

China was not even whispered. Nothing about the black market for babies or female infanticide and sex selective abortion that has skewed the births of boys to girls to 137:100 in some places.

It was politely ignored that most of the civil society organizations attending were also the biggest abortion providers (International Planned Parenthood Federation, Population Services International and Marie Stopes International).

And no one asked why Merck, Pfizer and other pharmaceutical giants at the summit, whose contraceptive profits will soar to an estimated $17 billion by 2015 because of the expanding market, need governments subsidizing their drugs.

Or if their testing of new injectable contraceptives on Senegalese and Ugandan women isn’t just a tad exploitative.

Melinda, the First Lady of Family Planning, has launched an upgraded version of family planning that is rolling out across the globe, and who, but the most raving lunatic, will oppose it?

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

An eight-week Bible study to bring women to healing from past abortions - what a marvellous offer of hope for women. Called Surrendering the Secret and isn't that at the core of the problem? Sin that is kept hidden might be forgiven but the woman does not experience the freedom of healing until she can let go of that painful secret. As Pope John Paul II said, when women who have had abortions speak up and defend life, they are the most eloquent witnesses that we can find.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Having just finished Dinesh D'Souza's book America after Obama, I find this difficult to believe. I don't think Obama has any religious faith. He considers himself above all religions, a man who is convinced he is called to lead the world to a place of equanimity. All countries are equal and he is setting about to make America equal to the rest of the world. That is D'Souza's hypothesis and it is pretty convincing.

However, this video is unsettling at the very least. And the fact that it was pulled from Fox News is even more unsettling.

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Suicide may be a right -- but no-one has the right to expect someone else to help them kill themself. Suicide is not dying. It is killing yourself. Assisted suicide is not 'helping someone to die.' It is assisting self-killing.

For sure, who is not terrified of being trapped inside a useless body, or of suffering from a horrible terminal disease? But assisted suicide is deeply problematic. It turns the helper into an accomplice to killing.

It would turn doctors from healers into the facilitators of death - a monstrous prospect which would destroy trust in the medical profession. Death can never be a therapeutic procedure. It can never be in society's interests that medicine should be turned into a death service.

Assisted suicide is also a slippery slope. The boundary between assisted suicide and euthanasia, which Ms Soubry says she opposes, would soon be swept away. Just look at the Netherlands to see how apparently good intentions about using killing to relieve suffering have paved the way to a chilling cult of death.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

It’s about time our Bishops started talking about this kind of stuff. It’s the direction and spiritual support that can make or break us, and they can provide a central point of unity that the Pro Life Movement can rally around. They are supposed to lead not follow. We’ve been crying for leadership for decades and finally we get some rock solid, and practical advice about a very important and critical strategic issue. Let us pray that we move forward in unity. SoCon or Bust

It is worth reading the two bishops' statements (click on the link to SoCon above) on the morality of working towards gestational limits on abortion. This has been an issue of contention between Campaign Life Coalition and other pro-life groups, and division does not help the pro-life cause. I have not been able to agree with CLC's stand that reducing abortions by putting gestational limits on them is denying the humanity of those who fall under those limits. As the Holy Father states, and Archbishop Miller and Cardinal Collins concur, "to support legislation which prohibits abortion after a certain number of weeks or point of fetal development does not in any way mean that one supports abortion before that point in time (unless, of course, the legislation was worded in such a way)." (John Pacheco's words)

It would be a crying shame if Campaign Life decides they have to stand firm on this issue and not move at all, while other groups are willing to go forward. The goal is to save lives, not to refuse to compromise.

"I have this image of many of the Campaign Life people appearing before St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. Peter says to them, "So you good people were pro-lifers. Tell me, how many abortions did you prevent?" And they reply, "Well, actually, none. But, damn it, we never once compromised."'
- Catholics Against the Church, by Michael W. Cuneo

Friday, September 7, 2012

The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.

What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.

And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.

Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme. Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

Particularly upsetting to me, and to Bill O'Reilly, was the speech by Caroline Kennnedy in which she proclaimed her Catholic faith and, at the same time, declared her support for abortion. To end the evening, Cardinal Dolan had invited himself to the convention to say a closing prayer. I have had enough of this hypocrisy; it is time for the Catholic leaders to stand behind what they say. When Cardinal Dolan says that abortion is wrong, then he needs to act as if he believes what he says. Trying to work both sides of the divide lacks integrity. And believing Catholics are tired of the lack of integrity in their leaders.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Sandra Fluke, the now-graduated law student from George Brown University, who wanted her contraception covered by health care, preceded Bill Clinton last night at the Democratic convention.

Does no one see the irony in this, except for Michelle Malkin? Sandra, a single woman with no plans to have a child, wants her contraception paid for ($9 per month by the way), becomes a featured speaker at the convention. Just before Bill Clinton, the man who can't keep his hands off women, comes right after her.

And the Democrats have the gall to say that Republicans are waging a war on women. Well, who would you rather be stuck alone with in an elevator - Mitt Romney who has no speck of scandal in his past, or Bill Clinton who has been accused of rape and gets a woman to give him a blow job in the Oval Office? At least Sandra Fluke will be prepared for Clinton's pass.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Talk about women being treated as objects - these women are treating themselves as such.

..... women dressed as vaginas.
The rally was opened by “Pillamina,” a woman dressed as a giant box of birth control pills, who has stalked Mitt Romney at campaign appearances in recent months. “We’re all here because our awesome president made me available at no co-pay,” she said, hyping the HHS mandate in President Obama’s health care reform. - Planned Parenthood hands out condoms

So where are the guys? Isn't it odd that these women are always by themselves, dressed up as vaginas, and there are no guys around? Can they not see they are completely unattractive to men when they do this? Guess it doesn't matter. Reproductive choice is everything to them. Perhaps they don't need any condoms, the costumes might be all the protection they need.

Having watched the Republican convention last week, I tuned in to the Democratic convention last night. It is amazing how people on two sides can take the same numbers and see them as completely different. Democrat after Democrat claimed that there are more jobs since Obama took office, that things are looking up.

When Sean Hannity gave them the real numbers of unemployed, they countered by twisting those stats to make it look as if Americans are actually better off. And then concluded by saying we gave George Bush 8 years to get us into this mess, we have to give Obama 8 years to get us out. No dealing with the actual debt this President has racked up; he has borrowed more money in three and a half years than Bush did in eight.

Fortunately, some of the mainstream press is beginning to smell a rat here.

The number Castro cites is an accurate description of the growth of private-sector jobs since January 2010, when the long, steep slide in employment finally hit bottom. But while a total of 4.5 million jobs sounds great, it's not the whole picture.

While that is indeed a gain of 4.5 million, it's only a net gain of 300,000 over the course of the Obama administration to date. The private jobs figure stood at 111 million in January 2009, the month Obama took office.

According to a study released last week by the liberal-leaning National Employment Law Project, low-wage fields such as retail sales and food service are adding jobs nearly three times as fast as higher-paid occupations.

The figure of 4.5 million jobs is accurate if you look at the most favorable period and category for the administration. But overall, there are still fewer people working now than when Obama took office at the height of the recession.CNN Fact Check: About those 4.5 million jobs

Is it any wonder that Hannity says "why is it when I talk to you Democrats, you seem to be in a trance?" Perhaps Obama will have met his nemesis in Paul Ryan, the walking-talking numbers guy.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

For the past six years Ms. Ekeocha has been living and working as a biomedical scientist in Canterbury, England. Most of her family and many friends still live in Nigeria. From Catholic Online: Ekeocha "was inspired to write an open letter to Melinda Gates after learning of Gates' move to inject $4.6 billion worth of contraceptive drugs and devices into her homeland." She is hoping Gates will hear her "as the voice of the African woman."

"Do I intend to speak for every African woman?"

Excellent question!!

My answer: Yes and No.

Yes. I speak for every woman living in the (sub-Saharan) African context, not as if I can read their minds, but as if I can read their living situations.

This is a bold statement to make but I would dare to make it because I understand the African society, the African cultural ethics and universal values, given that I was born and raised within that culture. Africa of course is comprised of many, many tribes and tongues and creeds (Catholic, Pentecostal, Evangelical, Islam and African Traditional religion). However across state lines, borders and languages, we share the universal values of the Culture of Life. This is why abortion advocates have found it very difficult (if not impossible) to sell legal abortion to any of these countries. There is a unanimous rejection of the Culture of Death, which is very much framed by the right to kill the defenceless unborn child in the womb.

As for the acceptance and use of artificial contraception, we have artificial contraceptives in Africa. In the last 2 decades, the UN has been on a mission to reduce the birth rate in Africa so they have flooded our hospitals with it, campaigning in urban and rural communities alike. But yet - surprise, surprise - most people still refuse to accept it because they perceive it as 'anti-life'. And besides, most African women know how to avoid or delay pregnancy without resorting to chemicals. They might be poor, but they are not slow nor stupid.

......
I would take the liberty to bring China into this conversation (only as an example) so please pardon me. The Chinese leaders have always had both unspeakable power and unfathomable wealth, so the moment they perceived the women's fertility as problematic, they used what they had to achieve what they wanted. They launched a rather expensive but effective war against fertility: state-sponsored abortions, forced sterilisations, mandatory contraception - all done without much consideration for human rights. Now in Africa among our governments, the desire to cap national population is there, the power (to trample human rights) is there, but the money is not, so women remain safe from this sort of violence.

But this could very easily change by the time Melinda pours into our territories the incredible amounts of artificial contraceptives that she is campaigning for (her target is to get enough for 120 million women! Most of whom are in Africa). I can just see this in the hands of the African dictators who will be quick to 'weaponise' every single one of these contraceptives (pill, pin, patch or injectables). I know many people who think that it is a 'nice' thing to do to get this 'choice' of birth control to the women, and I understand that they mean well, but are we willing to allow this extra edge of power to fall into the wrong hands? So on this point I speak for ALL African women who are as safe as the Authorities are disabled by limited supplies of artificial contraceptives.

......
But in more recent years, thoughts and tendencies of the younger African women on different things are informed and formed by a broad array of factors: social class, wealth, education, degree of devotion to faith - these will all determine her level of exposure to western cultural values (this one is very important - so an African woman who has access to internet and cable TV spends more time watching American TV series [such as Mad Men!] which is more often than not highly sexualised; over time her perception and definition of love, sex and family life is inevitably shaped and formed). So there is an emerging group of African girls (though not a majority at all) gradually being "westernised" because they perceive the entirety - the whole package - of the western life as the 'glamourous life', the 'modern life', the 'better life'.

In order to embrace and accept this life, they inadvertently let go of some or most of our African universal cultural standards. With this persistent pursuit of the 'better life', many young Africans are now standing on the precipice beyond which lies the mirage of happiness/fulfillment promised by the new western norms of sexual expression. They have the choice either to jump off that precipice leaving our own norms behind, or to stand back in the realisation and appreciation of the beauty and solidity of our own African Culture of Life, which is so compatible with faith and morals.

I personally have chosen not to jump, I know many many, many other African women who have also chosen not to jump. And I pray that as my beloved African sisters come up one after the other to that precarious precipice they too would turn back and hold tight unto the beautiful Culture of Life which holds the firm promise of light, life and true love.